Insights
Understanding Cloud Governance for a Successful Digital Journey
Highlights:
When you move to the cloud, you get a great deal of control over your data as you don’t have to spend much time managing required infrastructure. By adopting the right cloud governance strategy, you can manage access to data, mitigate security risks, and optimise cost. Many organizations practice a cloud-ready approach and offer hybrid cloud solutions to implement cloud governance. However, businesses can lose control of the cloud easily. It’s a tricky balance for businesses to control the cloud infrastructure as per the organization’s goal.
Going digital and delivering consumer-first experience has become the prime motto of every company, including the healthcare industry or retail or consumer packaged goods (CPG) industry. Owing to this, we help companies to offer services focussing on customer-first philosophy with cloud-enabled platforms.
Hence, the best cloud governance strategy plays a core part in using cloud and scaling it per customer requirements.
What is Cloud Governance?
According to Forrester cloud governance is, “the ability to provide strategic direction, track performance, allocate resources, and make adjustments to ensure that organizational objectives are met, without breaching the parameters of risk tolerance or compliance obligations.”
Cloud governance and cloud management are completely different concepts. Businesses are adopting cloud at a fast rate and along with it, the IT infrastructure is getting more complex. Researches reveal that cloud governance and cost management are the major concerns to get cloud maturity. Approximately 51% of businesses have central cloud teams for governance.
Cloud costs and efficiencies are major concerns for businesses. Hence, you need to set some rules on department-wise budget allocation, guidelines on what kind of software/apps the departments can use, cloud security policies, etc. These rules can be flexible. However, you need to set some approval process at certain levels. The cloud management software helps to monitor compliance with the rules. Such software gives 360-degree visibility to all cloud activities.
While monitoring the compliance with the rules, you can see the scope for efficiency improvement. Additionally, when you plan to expand your cloud-based operations, businesses need to make changes in the rules that are already created to welcome new products as well as services.
Hence, cloud governance is a bundle of rules you create, monitor, and revise as per necessity to control cloud costs, enhance efficiency, and remove security risks. Apart from these areas, there are many other segments in cloud operation that need governance. When you start gathering all the components they create the rules of governance.
Microsoft Azure in partnership with Harvard Business Review had a survey related to cloud governance. The report mentions that “Creating a formal structure for cloud governance early in the process can be critical to success.”
Download the complete report to get more insights. Link
Why is Cloud Governance important?
Cloud governance is a crucial part of your cloud infrastructure. It helps your employees to access cloud resources with ease while maintaining required levels of security and controls. When you migrate to the cloud, cost plays an important role in scaling and streamlining the cloud infrastructure in tandem with your business needs. Some of the prime reasons for having a good cloud governance strategy are:
Manage Cloud Resource & Accounts
AWS is advising all cloud customers to shift to multiple-tenant tasks staying in a single cloud account into their separate accounts. The best industry practice is to use multiple accounts to manage cloud workloads. It delivers accurate access control and manages the cost.
An efficient governance practice can help organize the volume of accounts and most organizations need and offer visibility around key cloud activities as well as trends.
Easy Access to Cloud Resource
When you have no idea about the location of your corporate data, your cloud infrastructure is likely to face some risks, and high expenditure. Even your employees get frustrated with the data access. A perfect cloud governance strategy allows easy requests and access to the data or resources based on geo-locations. And in this process, you also enhance the leadership confidence in moving to the cloud.
Reduces Risks
A business faces multiple risks while operating in the cloud whether its exposed data, cost overrun, or non-compliance with regulations. With a cloud governance strategy, you can ensure the cloud storage files like S3 buckets or Azure blobs have accurate control over data privacy. Additionally, the usages are compliant with standard regulations.
Reduces Labor
Cloud governance allows you to set guardrails at the correct point in your organizational hierarchy. You can control and manage access, policy, and budget for specific resources or objects. Additionally, cloud governance offers enforcement action that allows you to get rid of necessary follow-up actions upon receiving alerts. Cloud governance prevents budget overrun, saves labor, and effort.
Cloud Governance: Kickstart with Parkar NexGen Cloud Platform
Parkar Digital helps businesses discover the best approach to integrate new processes with existing IT governance policies, dashboards, and tools. In daily operations, we offer assistance with metering, billing, and chargebacks for consistent cost-efficiency gains. Our NexGen Cloud Platform has a governance framework that includes specific aspects of IT governance and cloud security.
Parkar Digital has 50+ azure certified engineers who have expertise around multiple aspects of cloud implementation, cloud migration, and cloud governance.
At Parkar Digital, we have helped many businesses with cloud adoption and define a governance framework that suits their business. The NexGen cloud platform is flexible enough to adapt to new-age technologies as per your business requirements. We encrypt and monitor the internal access to sensitive data, like medical data in case of healthcare, and infrastructure while allowing trusted external users to access this platform securely. We also provide a single data access point and a centralized logging system to manage data requests from external sources.
Our cloud governance strategy covers all the aspects of private, public, and hybrid cloud infrastructure. The cloud governance strategy of Parkar NexGen Cloud Platform includes:
Data Structuring | Create guidelines for your data in the cloud. We help you to manage your data source, who has access to it, and how it travels through the organization. We create master data management to ensure data consistency. |
Identity and Access Management | Enable you to govern user policies and put restrictions against unauthorized access to data. We define and manage the roles of individuals to allow data access whichever is required for work. |
Cost Management | Keep a strict eye on data and permission as cloud costs get easily out of control. Sometimes, the developers forget to shut down some unused applications. Additionally, if you utilize multiple cloud services and the bill can be high. We help to track and analyze the expenditure. |
Establish Optimum Security | Enable optimum security as per need Relying on your auditing as well as security needs, we can develop any number of tools or scripts to accumulate data. We also build a central monitoring solution across your business to trigger alerts upon detecting threats. |
About Parkar Digital
Parkar Digital, a Gold Certified Microsoft Azure partner, provides technology solutions for Digital Healthcare, Digital Retail & CPG. Our solutions are powered by the Parkar platforms built using Cloud, Opensource, and Customer experience technologies. Our goal is to empower a customer-first approach with digital technologies to deliver human-centric solutions for the clients.
THE AUTHOR
Amit Gandhi
As the Co-Founder and CTO for Parkar Digital, Amit leads the Technology and Engineering teams and is responsible for designing and implementing innovative technology solutions for clients across various industries.
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Parkar Digital is a digital transformation and software engineering company headquartered in Atlanta, USA, and has engineering teams across India, Singapore, Dubai, and Latin America.